Tag Archives: nature

[Update: The robin watch is over. Duties called us away for four days, and in that time, all three chicks up and flew away. Bad timing – but the nest remains for use – next year?]

It’s getting a bit more difficult to follow our daily robin hatchling updates, so we’re changing the strategy a bit. One post, that we will update with an additional picture or two every day. We’ll keep the latest picture on top to make it easier to keep track of.

Five-day old hatchlings are now clearly showing signs of feathers growing in. They have about filled the nest, meaning they are perhaps three or four times the body mass they were when they hatched less than a week ago. Their two parents – I can’t tell who is Mom and who is Dad – have pretty much a full time job going back and forth to feed them. However, I suppose because of our relatively cool weather right now (in the 50’s this morning) most of the time when I examine the nest they have heads buried under each other.

[Almost anyone who has spent time in Pakistan or parts of India recognizes the term ‘neem hakeem’ – means a doctor who isn’t quite up to par. Thus one of the most popular folk proverbs in the area: A ‘neem hakeem’ is a danger to your life…]

Today’s ‘Neem Hakeem’ lesson is via a story on NPR over the weekend. People are dying – literally – because of their headphones.

Strangled by the cords as they doze in class, maybe? Victims of brain cancer because of electromagnetic radiation? No – run over by buses, trains and other large and noisy vehicles:

Lisa Carolyn Moran, 20, a University of North Carolina exchange student from Scotland, was listening to an iPod while jogging when she stepped into the path of a bus in Chapel Hill last May. Joshua Phillips White, 16, was wearing earphones and walking on a train track in Cramerton, N.C., last November when a freight train hit him from behind, killing him; police said he apparently didn’t hear the locomotive approaching. Alan Eaton-Chandler, 17, was killed under the same circumstances just last Tuesday when he was hit by an Amtrak train in Comstock Township, Mich. And Vicky Baker, 39, was talking on her cell phone when she was struck and killed by a train in Albertville, Ala., in December.